Where does broccoli come from?

(Slide 1) Over the next few weeks we will begin to take plants apart and look at their interrelated pieces – cells first, the so-called building blocks, and then roots, stems and leaves. This is a very common approach to studying plant biology and useful in some ways. The danger is however that it may appear that somehow these pieces are somehow separate from each other, or even worse, we may begin to look at the plant or other living things as machines.

Plants are alive. Machines are not. Plants can replicate themselves, grow, and change. Machines do not. Nevertheless, this so-called mechanistic worldview is so common as to be almost unquestioned. It is seen in one of its most destructive forms in human medicine when specialists don’t talk over the whole of a person’s being, but only treat their particular specialty. This can result in people receiving medication or treatment for one illness that makes another worse.

Social systems are also viewed from a mechanistic perspective, so that every day 40,000 children die from preventable diseases. Diseases that do not require medicine but require clean water and sanitation. Hunger is treated with food shipments, rather than education and employment and equity.

This is all a manifestation of a Cartesian worldview, most closely associated with Descartes, that separated mind and body, person and family, roots from stems from leaves.

Today, I want to share with you an understanding of life, particularly plant life, but really all of life that is based on a systems view of the world. I’ll do this using piece of a movie called Mindwalk, based on a book by Frijof Capra. In this movie there are three characters, Sam Waterman plays Jack the Senator from the US. John Heard plays Thomas, the poet and Jack’s friend. Liv Ullman, plays Sonya the disenchanted physicist who has taken time away from her work to think about the world. The scene is Mont St. Michel a castle on the shoreline of France. The first scene will our friends viewing an ancient clock…… (VCR-5 minutes)

So Sonya says, “we need a different view of the world”. But what is that viewpoint. The next scene from a bit later in the film, as Jack and Sonya are walking on the beach outside the castle. Jack admits that the mechanistic viewpoint may be harmful, but he truly doesn’t know how else to view life. He asks Sonya, how do you study a tree without taking it apart. The next clip is Sonya’s response… (VCR-10 minutes)

Life is self-organizing; self-maintaining, self-renewing, and self-transcending. We will talk about this more throughout the rest of the course. This answer to the question “what is life” represents a systems view of nature. It is based on the understanding of levels of complexity which extend from the proton, neutron and electron to the universe and place organisms like plant and people in a hierarchy of increasing complexity. Lets look at a model. (Powerpoint)

Most plant biology courses will start with the organism, the plant, and take it apart as Jack suggested to be normal. ( Slide 2) And this isn’t wrong, or bad, as long as we understand that whole plants exist as part of whole systems. In this model, we begin with a plant, then take it apart to look at the roots, and then the cells of the roots, and then the atoms and particles that make up its smaller bits. It is quite common to see this as life; (Slide 3) organisms, organs, molecules, atoms and particles. In fact, if you take most biology courses on this campus, this is what you will learn.

The problem is not that it is wrong, but that it is incomplete. We often forget that plants exist within larger systems, as our friend Sonya reminded us. (Slide 4).

Today, we will begin with the organism and “look up” to some of the larger systems and wonder where did it all come from. Lets start with the lowly broccoli plant (Slide 5) and ask the question, so how did it get here.

Well, lets start with a story…..

This is the story, at least the scientific version of the story, of the creation of the universe and the emergence of life, including broccoli. It began a long time ago. In fact 15 billion years ago, according to most scientists.

It's tough to get a handle on concepts like billions of years. These numbers are just too large to grasp. To help us see our creation story using a scale we might be able to understand, try to imagine our 15 billion year history of the universe compressed into one hundred years. (Slide 6) Using this timescale, ten years equals 1.5 billion years. Each year equals 150 million years. A day is about half a million years. Each hour is 18,000 years; each minute, 300 years; and each second, 5 years. In this story, lets imagine that fifteen billion years is 100 years.

In the beginning it was dark (Slide 7).

At the moment of creation, the so-called big bang, one hundred years ago using our time frame, everything exploded from a single point. Bang. (Slide 8) Everything was energy. Fifteen billion years ago (or in our new time frame, one hundred years ago), in a great flash, the universe exploded into being. Heady with its power, the universe billowed out in every direction, ever expanding, and seemingly still doing so today. (Slide 9). The first matter began to form from that energy within 2 days in our 100 year time frame. The first matter being the simple atoms of hydrogen (with one proton) and helium (with two). These two elements wrapped up in an energy explosion that has never been seen again, began to expand.

(Slide 10) As the explosion began to slow down and particles began to congeal around each other, stars began to form during the 8^th year of our hundred year time span--the Andromeda galaxy (Slide 11), the Virgo cluster of galaxies (Slide 12), , Pegasus (Slide 13), , the Hercules cluste(Slide 14), as well as our own Milky Way (Slide 15). One hundred billion galaxies in all. (Slide 16), These gigantic structures pin-wheeled through the emptiness of space each brought forth from its own materials billions upon billions of new stars (Slide 17).

The most brilliant stars rushed through a sequence of transformations, exploding over and over, forming supernovas (Slide 17) that matched a billion stars in brightness and spewed stellar materials throughout the galaxies (Slide 18).

New stars formed out of the materials that had been created in the billion-year processes of stellar birth. Second-generation stars (Slide 19) were more complex in internal structure because when the first stars exploded they had created the elemental chemicals of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, molybdenum, calcium, magnesium, and all the other hundred elements as the single atom of hydrogen fused to make bigger atoms (Slide 20).

Among these many stars, the Sun (Slide 21) of the Milky Way galaxy blasted off clouds of elements that spun into a circular disc of matter out of which arose the solar system of Sun (Slide 22), Mercury, Venus, Earth (3^rd planet out), Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. This happened when the universe was 70 years old in our 100 year time frame.

The early planets of this galaxy mostly boiled. (Slide 23) On Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Pluto, chemical combinations of atoms slowly became rocks and continents of the planetary crust. No chemical combinations formed anything like those that would emerge as life. Matter existed as a solid. A quite dead solid. (Slide 24) On Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus chemical creativity got started but never advanced beyond the simpler compounds. Matter existed as a solid and a gas, but also quite dead. (Slide 25)

On Earth (Slide 26), due to its distance from the sun, matter existed in the unique combination of solid, liquid, and gas, and flowed from one form into another to provide a creative chemical womb from which the first living cell somehow emerged (Slide 27), in the spring of 73.

These living cells had the power to organize themselves (self-organization) and to create another living cell (self-replication). They gave birth. The first living cell and her descendents, by gathering hydrogen from the water in the ocean, released oxygen into Earth's system. (Slide 28). The oxygen slowly saturated the land, atmosphere and seas and by altered the Earth's chemistry with this element of explosive power (Slide 29). The first cells were anaerobic, but they produced oxygen and in the first of the major disasters for life on the planet, actually produced oxygen to the point where it was toxic to most living things. Then out of the oxygen crisis, arose a new and radically advanced being. The cells that survived and adapted to this new atmosphere could breathe oxygen (like us). (Slide 30)

The stress of oxygen toxicity caused an evolutionary advancement from simple prokaryotic (cells without nuclei) to more complex, yet still single celled, eukaryotic organisms with a nucleus. These new bacteria were not only capable of breathing oxygen but eukaryotes invented sex, and the universe's diversity expanded a hundredfold as now two genetically different beings could unite and fashion out of their genetic materials a radically new being. (Self-transcendence).

These Eukaryotes also invented the habit of eating each other in year 90 (only 10 years ago), and thus creating the complexity of ecosystems, organisms eating other organisms. Fungi were born that ate dead matter. Animals were born that ate live plant cells. Plant cells continued to capture solar energy and grow. Complexity advanced.

Next, the single-celled eukaryotes took that daring step of merging with other cells into a larger being (Slide 31), as trillions of them gathered together and created the first multi-cellular organism in year 91. Starting as mostly just blobs of cells, they began to organize different functions for various parts of the organism.

Four years later, in year 95, new multi-cellular organisms (Slide 32) arose with a variety of distinct body parts; they included the corals, worms, insects, clams, starfish, sponges, spiders, leeches, and many forms of ocean going algae (Slide 33). In February of year 97, only 3 years ago, ocean waves left sea plants (algae) stranded on the hot rocks; unable to crawl home they instead merged with fungi to form lichen (Slide 34). Later they invented the wood cell and learned to stand up straight as trees that lived along the shores of oceans and rivers and that later covered entire continents (Slide 35). The animals followed the plants onto land, and soon the continents that had been floating lifelessly on Earth's crust for two billion years exploded with amphibians and reptiles (Slide 36) and insects and of course the great dinosaurs (Slide 37) in May of 98.

Sixty-seven million years ago astronomical collisions (probably meteors) (Slide 38) so changed Earth's atmosphere and climates that nearly all forms of animal life had to reinvent themselves or perish. Mass extinctions meant many animals followed the dinosaurs into their graves, but such destruction also opened up new possibilities, which were seized upon by the birds and the mammals, among others, who proliferated in the wake of the disaster.

During the last sixty-seven million years, the beauty and terror of the present world - the brilliance of the birds' plumage, the intoxicating display of the flowers, the lusciousness of fruit.

F OUR MILLION YEARS, (Slide 40) less than 2 weeks ago, in Africa, humans stood up on just two limbs, and a week ago they began using their free hands to shape Earth's materials into tools. Three days ago, on December 27 of year 99, these restless hands were controlling fire.

Empowered with both the strong mother-child bond (Slide 41) and new conscious self-awareness, the human began the search for its own distinct niche within the enveloping Earth community.

Our species, Homo sapiens, is a very recent expression of the universe, emerging from the life of the planet only 24 hours ago, at the beginning of the last day of the Universe’s 99^th year of existence, 15 billion years after its birth.

Beginning around thirty-five thousand years ago, about 2 hours ago, as if unable to restrain any longer their astonishment at existence, humans began a new level of celebration (Slide 42) that displayed itself in cave paintings, that filled the nights with festivals and music-making, that created ceremonies to note the passing of friends and seasons.

About one hour ago, Earth, through its human creation, arrived upon a conscious awareness of the patterns of seeds, plants and seasons. Although some of these patterns had been set into existence by Earth billions of years ago, and although the first humans had organized themselves for millions of years within these patterns, twelve thousand years ago or 40 minutes ago, humans began consciously shaping these patterns by domesticating plants and animals-wheat and barley and goats in the Middle East, rice and pigs in Asia, corn and beans in the Americas. For the first time, humans began to control, rather than to simply randomly hunt or harvest other earthly life forms (plants first and later animals) in a conscious way to make human lives easier. Living beings that were formerly neighbors, (Slide 44) or perhaps even brothers and sisters, become prey. Plants which had formerly been the gift of the gods became crops (Slide 45).

A secure supply of food (Slide 46) enabled populations to surge. The first Neolithic villages to sustain human groups of more than a thousand people emerged ten thousand years ago (about a half hour ago). Soon tribal settlements arose throughout the planet as most of humanity moved from its hunting and gathering mode of life into that of villages, the most radical social transformation ever to occur in the human story. Pottery, weaving, and architecture were developed, calendars articulating the cosmic rhythms appeared, rituals and shrines to the Great Mother Goddess (Slide 47) were created.

In this period from 11:30pm to 11:45pm on the last day of the last year, developments in language, religion, cosmology, the arts, music, and dance emerged resulting in cultures that are with us today. Human society evolved along with the technologies that allowed us to control (or at least to let us think we had control) of nature. We called this agriculture. (Slide 48). And everything changed….

The process of biological and social evolution continues. (Slide 49) The story is far from over. How will those living ten thousand years in the future, a half hour from now on our timescale, tell the story of our times? Will there even be humans on Earth in ten thousand years? The answer depends in large part on how we deal with each other and the natural world over the next fifty years or in out shortened timeline, over the next ten seconds (Slide 50).

I love this story. To learn more, check out the web page “thegreatstory.org”. I will try to put this class on the biology of plant life within the context of this larger story, in hopes that as we study the science of plants, we do not lose the mystery, the majesty and the miracle that is life on earth.

Largely adapted from the prologue to “The Universe Story” by Swimme and Berry (Harper-Collins, 1992).